Happy October 1st! All month long we are celebrating Halloween by conducting spooky science experiments, building creepy crafts, and more!
For today’s science experiment to kick off the month of October, we did a simple Witches/Wizards Brew. We normally talk about the reaction of baking soda and vinegar which creates carbon dioxide when combined, but today I decided to go a bit deeper and talk about color!
How Do We See Color?
We used several colors that exploded in the cauldrons when the chemical reaction occurred, and so my question to my boys were, “How do we see color?”
Here’s my simple explanation to them: When light hits an object, two things happen-1) the object absorbs some of the light and 2) the object reflects the rest of it. The reflected light goes to our eyes where the cone photoreceptors are, and this allows us to see the color of the object.
This of course prompted more questions such as “how do people who are blind see?”, “How do we see at night?”, “what about people who are colorblind?” So many great questions from this simple witches/wizards brew science experiment!
When you do this experiment with your kids, comment below with their questions! I would love to read what comes to their mind about how we see color.
Now on to our witches and wizards brew experiment…
Materials
Directions
1- Put each cauldron side by side in a tray.
2- Add about 1 heaping tablespoon of baking soda to each cauldron.
3- Add in a few drops of food coloring on to the baking soda.
4- Add about 1/4 cup of vinegar into each of the cauldrons and watch the “potion brew and overflow!”
*Watch our video below to see how we did this experiment and also watch for what my kids call “an EPIC” version of this baking soda and vinegar experiment!
